This text was originally intended to be the
introduction to a french language edition of two of Amadeo Bordiga's
texts on Russia: Russia and Revolution in Marxist Theory and Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today.
However this proposed edition was the subject of legal action by the
International Communist Party who claimed they held the copyright and
was never published. Camatte's introduction was finally published in Invariance Series II, n. 4, 1974. This translation by David Brown was published in London in 1978.

Subsequently part of Bordiga's Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today was published (first by Editions de l'oubli in 1975, later by Spartacus) with a different introduction by Camatte. Russia and Revolution in Marxist Theory itself was finally published by Spartacus in 1978.

Publishing Bordiga's texts on Russia and writing an introduction to
them was rather repugnant to us. The Russian revolution and its
involution are indeed some of the greatest events of our century.
Thanks to them, a horde of thinkers, writers, and politicians are not
unemployed. Among them is the first gang of speculators which asserts
that the USSR is communist, the social relations there having been
transformed. However, over there men live like us, alienation persists.
Transforming the social relations is therefore insufficient. One must
change man. Starting from this discovery, each has 'functioned'
enclosed in his specialism and set to work to produce his sociological,
ecological, biological, psychological etc. solution. Another gang turns
the revolution to its account by proving that capitalism can be
humanised and adapted to men by reducing growth and proposing an ethic
of abstinence to them, contenting them with intellectual and aesthetic
productions, restraining their material and affective needs. It sets
computers to work to announce the apocalypse if we do not follow the
advice of the enlightened capitalist. Finally there is a superseding
gang which declares that there is neither capitalism nor socialism in
the USSR, but a kind of mixture of the two, a Russian cocktail ! Here
again the different sciences are set in motion to place some new goods
on the over-saturated market.

That
is why throwing Bordiga into this activist whirlpool (and we also put
ourselves there) provoked fear and repulsion. Nevertheless, running the
risk of being carried along by this infamous mercantilism seems
necessary because, on one hand, in every case, as Marx remarked "Can
one escape dirt in ordinary bourgeois intercourse or trade? Precisely
there is its natural abode." (Marx to Freiligrath, 29.2.1860.), and, on
the other hand, the myth of Russian communism began to be washed
fundamentally from the minds of those who searched and struggled and
corrupted them less and less after the movement of May 1968. Bordiga's
texts could be useful because of this, for passing from myth to reality
and helping in the understanding of the coming communist revolution.

The
Russian revolution has long been a thing of the past. It is interesting
to study it nonetheless in the historical vibrations and in the
questions it could not resolve. Bordiga, who closely followed all the
vicissitudes of this revolution and its many faceted prolongation over
the world, died in 1970. But his confrontation with the Russian
phenomenon maintains an instructive and all-embracing character.

One
has, then, to envisage the human being who produced the work presented
here, because one must state from which historical global point of view
it is that the Russian revolution is envisaged. Bordiga is especially
known through Lenin's judgements; he was reproached for his
abstentionism and taxed with anarchism. Also, for many people, Bordiga
would only be the leftist who disappeared from the revolutionary scene
around 1928. Superficially this is true, Convinced that it was the
counter-revolution which generated great men, i.e. the clowns that he
called battilocchi [1], he withdrew and disappeared into an anonymity [2] that was justified, but which is not to say that he abandoned the
communist movement. From 1944 to 1970 he participated in the
Internationalist Communist Party, which became the International
Communist Party in 1964. His works appeared in the papers Battaglia comunista and il programma comunista and the reviews Prometeo and Sul filo del tempo.

Bordiga summed up his position on the Russian revolution at the end of the first part of Russia and Revolution in Marxist Theory [3] , which simultaneously unveiled his fundamental theoretical[4] attitude, his absolute resistance to doubt, not to heuristic doubt,
which is by definition only a kind of cunning of reason according to
Hegel, placing certainty in brackets, but the doubt which is the
penetration of the adversaries' power, invasion by the surrounding
ideology, impregnation with death because of the abandonment of all
enthusiasm, and all revolutionary perspective, which is concretised in
the alliance with the existing currents and the acceptance of dominant
formulae.

Bordiga
wrote a lot on the Russian revolution. His activity was greatly
conditioned by the need to defend it and, on the other hand, in 1951 he
declared:

"The analysis of the counter-revolution in Russia and its reduction to
formulae is not a central problem for the strategy of the proletarian
movement during the recovery that we await, because it is not the first
counter-revolution and marxism has known a whole series of them."
[5]

All his activity tended to go beyond the Russian revolution to pose the
future revolution, while one can definitely state that he did not
succeed in cutting his umbilical cord, the link with this revolution.

He
immediately supported the Bolsheviks in 1917, without at times knowing
the totality of the events and, in certain cases, he foresaw the
measures they would take. The revolution was no surprise for him, it
did not make him question marxism, but was an enlightening
confirmation. What fundamentally preoccupied him was the preparation of
the party in Italy as well as in the rest of the West for the
accomplishment of the same task as the Bolsheviks': the seizure
of power. It was from this viewpoint that he carried on the polemic on
the creation of soviets. For him, they were born at the very moment of
the revolution. But in Italy, especially in 1917, one had to aid it, to
lead it, and one needed the class organ, the party, for that. Moreover,
he stated that the soviets were most often conceived of through an
anarcho-syndicalist vision: the proletariat creates the organs
which are substituted (the capitalist mode of production (CMP) still
being in force) for the capitalist organs: cf. his articles in il Soviet in
1919-20. From 1919 on Bordiga thought that a great revolutionary
opportunity had been lost and that the revolutionary phase had passed.
Therefore one had to strengthen the party and to resist the foreseen
offensive from the right which wanted to destroy the socialist forces.
His interventions in the Communist International were in favour of
strengthening the parties, claiming that the adoption of measures was
so that all the parties of the International would have purely marxist
positions, hence his role in the adoption of the 21 conditions, two of
which were written under his inspiration. To confront the struggle on a
world scale, one would have to have the correct class positions,
flawlessly, without equivocation.

Later,
when the phase of recession was really underway, the Communist
International tried to restart revolutionary activity by going to the
masses (united front), then by bolshevizing the national communist
parties. Bordiga stood up against all these formulations, considering
them to be camouflage measures of withdrawal, while being patent
manifestations of a new wave of opportunism. However, he never
questioned the proletarian, socialist, character of the Russian
revolution. He thought that it had some peculiarities, but he neither
spoke like the KAPD (Communist Workers' Party of Germany), which called
it a "bourgeois revolution made by communists" (The Principle of the Antagonism between the Soviet Government and the Proletariat) from 1922 on, nor of the duality of the revolution:

"The Third International is a Russian creation, a creation of the
Russian Communist Party. It was created to support the Russian
revolution, that is, a partly proletarian, partly bourgeois,
revolution." [6]

Also, in replying to Korsch, who sent him the Platform of the Left:[7]

"One cannot say that the 'Russian revolution was a bourgeois
revolution'. The 1917 revolution was a proletarian revolution, while it
would be wrong to generalise its 'tactical' lessons. Today the question
posed is knowing what happens to a proletarian dictatorship in a
country when a revolution does not follow in the others.... It seems
that you exclude the possibility of a Communist Party policy which
would not end in the restoration of capitalism. That would be to revert
to justifying Stalin or to supporting the inadmissible policy of 'his
dismissal from power'." (Naples, 28.10.26.) [8]

Put another way, throughout this period he did not take a position on
the social nature of the USSR. What was essential for him (and what few
of his critics understood) was the nature of the Russian state and
which class was in power. This was shown by the programme, by the
actions of the party running the state. For Bordiga, the Russian party
alone should not have run the state. That should have been done by the
Communist International. That is why the 1926 debate, ending in the
victory of the theory of socialism in one country, was crucial for him
because it indicated a capital change of the state which no longer
could be defined as proletarian because it was no longer at the service
of the world revolution. But:

"One cannot simply state that Russia is a country tending towards capitalism." [9]

That is why it was only after the transfer of the USSR to the side of
the western democracies that Bordiga stated that, henceforth, the
counter-revolution had really triumphed and that capitalism would be
built in the USSR.

If
capitalism tended to triumph, how would one characterise the USSR and,
on the other hand, what was the origin of capitalism's development?
Was there a retreat, that is, would there have been socialism and, from
that, the CMP would have been reinstalled in Russia? Bordiga
maintained his political thesis in this debate which developed very
vigorously after 1945. He still talked of the socialist characteristics
of the economy in Soviet Russia from the Revolution to Today [10] . Here he replied to the question: which class is in power in Russia?

"In fact the class exploiting the Russian proletariat (and which will
appear, perhaps, in broad day light in not too long) is today
constituted by two evident historical forms: international
capitalism and the same oligarchy which dominates in the interior and
on which the peasants, traders, enriched speculators and the
intellectuals, who swiftly obtain the greatest favours, all depend."

The whole of the article shows Bordiga's international
perspective and the importance he gave to the political factor, i.e. to
the capacity that a proletarian state could have to apply measures in
the direction of the development of the bases of socialism. To return
to the ruling class, he characterised it in other articles as a host of
hidden entrepreneurs. This did not stop him from speaking of
bureaucracy too, but he did not make it a determining strata or, as did
Chaulieu, a ruling class. Yet, the difficulties with which he tried to
unmask the existence of this class were always stated. He had to
intervene in the debate on the social nature of the USSR in which some
envisaged state capitalism where the state would be all powerful and
could run capital, and others saw bureaucratic capitalism (Chaulieu in Socialisme ou barbarie no.
2), and on the role of the USSR in the play of international forces.
Most 'left' revolutionaries tended to see the USSR as the centre of the
counter-revolution because state capitalism or bureaucratic capitalism
was, according to them, a much more powerful form of domination, a
higher stage of capitalism than the one possible in West Europe or in
the USA.

Bordiga began to draft Property and Capital [11] in reply, with really fundamental elements of explanation, producing a
contribution to the clarification of the future of Russian society and
that in the West, bordering on simple Leninist repetitions. In the
chapter Modern Tendency of the Enterprise without property, allocations and concessions, he confronted a question that he took up again later in Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today [12] , he stated:

"The modern state has never really had a direct economic activity, but
it has always been delegated by the intermediary of allocations and
concessions to capitalist groups." [13]

Here we see the assertion of the positive critique of state capitalism
and the bureaucracy-class. This is explained in the chapter Economic Interventionism and Direction as capital handling the State:

"It is not a case of the partial subordination of capital to the state,
but an ulterior subordination of the state to capital." [14]

Finally he analysed The Phases of the Transformation of Russia after 1917 where he dealt with the question of the ruling class in Russia:

"The difficulty in finding a physical group of men who constitute this
bourgeoisie which was not formed spontaneously and which, to the extent
that it was formed under Tsarism, was destroyed after 1917, presents a
great difficulty due only to the fact of the democratic and
petit-bourgeois mode of thought which the pretended masters of the
working class have infected it with for decades." [15]

Thus it was a matter of knowing who represented the capitalist economic
interests. It is clear that Bordiga would have to contradict such a
bourgeois mode of thought in its archaic (i.e. democratic) form:
everything that exists, which manifests itself, must be represented,
there must be an intermediary between the thing and those who see it,
the intermediary is a delegation of the existence regarding those who
must state and study this existence. For Bordiga, a fundamentally
anti-democratic man, the intermediary had no importance. On the other
hand, the bureaucracy was chosen to fill the hiatus by all those who
preoccupied themselves with Russia, Bordiga showed that, on the
contrary, the bureaucracy depended on the businessmen:

"...the bourgeoisie, which has never been a caste,
but which emerges by defending the right of 'virtual' and total
equality, becomes a 'network of spheres of interest which constitute
themselves in the cell of each enterprise', at the rate and to the
extent that the bourgeois enterprises become personnel collectives,
anonymity's, and finally 'public'. The personnel of such a cell is
extremely varied. They are no longer owners, bankers or shareholders,
but more and more speculators, economic experts and businessmen.
One of the characteristics of the development of the economy is that
the privileged class has an increasingly changing and fluctuating human
material (the oil sheikhs who were bailiffs and will be so again). As
in all epochs, such a network of interests and persons, who are more or
less visible, has relations with the state bureaucracy, but it itself
is not the bureaucracy, it has relations with 'circles of politicians',
but it is not a political category. During capitalism above all such a
network is 'international' and today there are no longer national
bourgeois classes. There are national states of the world capitalist class.
Today the Russian state is one of them, but with a certain
historically unique origin. In fact it is the only one originating in
the unity of two revolutions by the political and insurrectionary
victory. It was the only one that was turned back from the second
revolutionary task, but it has still not exhausted the first:
making Russia a region of mercantile economy (with profound
consequences for Asia)." [16]

Concerning the role of Russia on a world scale, Bordiga stated that the
centre of the counter-revolution was the USA and not the USSR. The USA
could intervene alone or through the UN, and in his polemic with
Damen [17] , he offered this witticism to make himself better understood:

"..let us remove Baffone (i.e.
Stalin) from Moscow and, so as not to ridicule anyone, let us replace
him with Alpha (i.e., Bordiga). Truman, who has already thought over
these questions, would arrive five minutes later." [18]

Bordiga saw the basic victory of the counter-revolution in the fact
that the Stalinists had sided with the USA during the 1939-45 war. The
USSR had been bought with the US Dollar, He stated that the same would
happen to China at the time of the Korean war.

All this was given in thesis form at the Internationalist Communist Party Naples meeting, Lessons of counter-revolutions, double revolutions, capitalist revolutionary nature of the Russian economy (1951).
These were partly scandalous for some people; how could one continue to
use the adjective revolutionary for the USSR in 1951? Now Bordiga
restated it in Russia and Revolution in Marxist Theory; for him
there had been other revolutions and there are others (when Bordiga
wrote) than the one we have to realise: the communist revolution.
Given its non-appearance and especially the lack of any important
precursory sign of its approach, it was evident (for Bordiga) that the
generalisation of the CMP in Russia and Asia was a revolutionary
phenomenon, as Marx had stated in 1848 for the development of capital
in Europe.

However,
if one considers now that the Russian revolution has, by definition,
only been able to give rise to the CMP, the characteristics of present
Russian society must be described again as well as those of the ruling
class. If the questions unfailingly re-emerge, it is because the
analysis had not basically regained the essential point of capital's
development and it had not described the most recent tendencies. That
is why Bordiga had to return to Marx so as to describe the Russian
phenomenon.

"True to a vision which has forgotten materialism is the one al lowing
itself to go astray when it does not see the 'person' of the individual
capitalist in the front rank. Capital was an impersonal
force from the youngest Marx, Determinism without men is meaningless,
that is true, but men constitute the instrument and not the
motor." [19]

The debate, in fact, centred again on a definition of capital. In Murder of the Dead he
recalled that Marx characterised the CMP by the production of
surplus-value and the greed for surplus-labour ("The voracious appetite
for surplus labour" in Capital Vol., I [20] ). He confronted the "novelty of state capitalism" on this basis:

"Once constant capital is posed as zero,
gigantic development of profit occurs. That is the same as saying that
the enterprise profit remains if the disadvantage of maintaining
constant capital is removed from the capitalist.
This hypothesis is only state capitalism's present reality.
Transferring capital to the state means that constant capital equals
zero. Nothing of the relationship between entrepreneurs and workers is
changed, since this depends solely on the magnitude of variable capital and surplus-value.
Are analyses of state capitalism something new? Without any haughtiness we use what we knew from 1867 at the latest. It is very short: Cc = O.
Let us not leave Marx without this ardent passage after the cold formula:
"Capital is dead labour which, vampire like, lives by sucking
living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." " [21]

Bordiga developed this theme which he often readopted on the
relationship between state capitalism, business activity and
speculative exploitation of natural disasters (defining the Italian
economy as a specialist in the economy of disaster). Here he showed
that capitalism is, at its greatest development, generalised
gangsterism universal delinquency and, let us add, madness.

For it is only through the destruction of constant capital, above all
the fixed part, that it can free the new production process where
capital can again satisfy its greed for surplus labour.

On the other hand, he replied in Doctrine of possessed by the Devil [23] to the question, what is the ruling class? Here again he relied on Marx's analysis in Capital:

"The person of the capitalist no longer matters here, capital exists
without him a hundred fold the same process. The human subject has
become useless. A class not comprising of individuals? The state not
at the service of a social group, but an impalpable power, a work of
the Holy Ghost and the Devil? Let us refer to the irony of our old Mr.
Marx. Here is the promised quote:
"By turning his money into commodities which serve as the building
materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by
incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity, the
capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its
objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform
its own valorisation process, an animated monster which begins to
'work', 'as if possessed by the devil'." " [24]

In 1952 Bordiga replied to Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR with Dialogue with Stalin [25] where he restated what he had said in previous articles (cf. In the Whirlpool of mercantile anarchy);
the Russian revolution was over. He also refuted the Stalinist thesis
of the law of value persisting under socialism, a refutation repeated
several times after. Each time Bordiga was obliged to return to Marx's
work to resume the integral study of the critique of political economy.

The
statement that the Russian revolution was over left a question
undecided. How was it that the proletariat could perform a bourgeois
revolution? (Bordiga accused Lenin of being the great bourgeois,
Stalin, the romantic revolutionary). October 1917, was it not at all
proletarian? It was then that Bordiga drafted a series of articles
studying the earliest origins of the Russian revolution. He insisted on
the conclusion already drawn by the KAPD in 1922: the revolution
was a double, proletarian and bourgeois, revolution. Since the former
had been reabsorbed (that had already been partly affirmed in 1946) and
the second had largely flourished. The proletariat has thus realised
the bourgeois revolution:

"With this state of suspense passed by with the very wars lost on the
frontiers and the national humiliation of seeing the Muslim and yellow
peoples more advanced in the capitalist methods of warfare, they had
found all the tendencies for the 'romantic' task of the proletariat;
i.e. how to resolve the historical puzzle of not taking power itself,
but of giving it to its social exploiters. A whole literature worked
for this and by a series of giants from, perhaps, Gogol on, while the
greats, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Gorky, had in various ways and to
different extents, absorbed the social postulates of the West:
characteristic of romantic and non-marxist thought." [26]
"As there was no bourgeoisie conscious of its own class power, the
marxists thus set to work as 'enlighteners', i.e. to repeat the
bourgeoisie's thought in its romantic part." [27]

Finally there are eight theses on Russia in The Bear and its Great Novel. [28] They define the result of the revolutionary process. Thesis five dealt with the ruling class:

"The statement of the present lack of a statistically definable
bourgeois class does not contradict the previous thesis, since this
fact was stated and foreseen by marxism well before the revolution,
given that the power of modern capitalism is defined by the forms of
production and not by national groups of individuals."

Then Bordiga thought that he had sufficiently clarified
the 'Russian question' and that one could approach other important
ones:

"The comrade (Bordiga) foresaw that this meeting would include a
section dedicated to the problem of America and western capitalist
countries in particular, given that a considerable previous work had
sufficiently crystallised in outlines a general definition of our mode
of considering Russia and its social economy. It showed the marxist
concept of the double revolution, one grafted on the other, or impure
revolution (giving the term an historical and not a moral meaning). The
Dialogue (with Stalin) and other texts had sufficiently systematised this part, now we have to study a pure, solely anticapitalist, proletarian, revolution." [29]

But the umbilical cord linking the PCI militants to the Russian
revolution was difficult for them to break and, for them, all these
explanations had not clarified enough the 'enigma'. They called for the
subject to be exhausted somehow. After dealing with Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist Theory and The Agrarian Question [30]
, which was in fact an introduction to a study of Russia (Bordiga
insisted on the thesis capitalism = agrarian revolution, and on the
fact that the agrarian problem was the central problem which the
Russian revolution had to resolve and the communist revolution also
will have to resolve), he had to return to Russia to begin Russia and Revolution in Marxist Theory.

Thus the reader can gain an idea of the way in which the work presented
was born. One should note that the majority of the themes were treated
in a fragmentary fashion in articles and, besides, there was a
continual exchange between the explanations of Russian society and the
clarification of the critique of political economy. There is the
constant theme of the dictatorship of the proletariat which could have
directed the development of the productive forces in immense Russia.
That is why what interested Bordiga was the nature of the state, not
only because he did not delude himself on the fact that the state could
avoid being determined by the economic and social structure. He knew
very well that, in Russia, from a certain moment, the social forces
would inevitably have to eliminate the proletarian state unsupported by
a revolution in the West. But he did not go into the economic domain,
but into the political field in order to find the involution of the
revolution. It was only when the state had become definitely capitalist
that he really preoccupied himself with the economic and social
structure, for now one had to understand how the forces which will have
to struggle for the future communist revolution will be born and
orientate themselves. It is revealing that it was at the time of the
Twentieth Congress, the time that he stated that Russia had confessed
to its integration into the capitalist camp, that he gave his
prediction of the communist revolution for 1975.

Bordiga's
writings on the USSR after 1957 are not very interesting. They are only
an illustration of what he had stated and explained in earlier texts.
Besides, what was virulently repeated was the axiom: one did not
construct communism, one only destroyed the obstacles to its
development. He would have had to have made an exhaustive analysis of
the development of the CMP to make a fundamental contribution. Now this
was (in spite of several essential remarks, possibly points of
departure for fruitful research) too 'physiocratic' because it
considered the mass of production and its growth rhythms. In 1964,
after the failure of Khruschev's economic measures, his sacking and the
satisfaction of the kolkhozians' demands, Bordiga remarked:

"Nevertheless, obviously the road to the full forms of capitalism in
Russia will be hard and difficult and will have again to bring large
capital into conflict with small property, which large capital has not
been able to avoid supporting and reinforcing. Thus is buried the
heroic and huge effort of the Bolshevik avant-garde which foresaw the
sole possibility for resistance in the wake of the proletarian world
revolution, like a besieged fortress, as refuge in state capitalism
controlled by the proletarian dictatorship, committing the leap to
economic socialism to the arms of the future and inevitable
revolutionary wave in the industrialised countries in the West." [31]

Unfortunately this diagnosis was used in an immediate and polemical
fashion to show that, unlike what Khruschev had trumpeted, the USSR
could not catch up with the USA. One should have asked the
question: are there not geo-social areas where the CMP cannot
develop and, if it did, would that not be at the cost of immense
difficulties so that even the positive side that there had been in the
West would be obliterated in these areas? But this implied the
adoption of a critical attitude to the Bolsheviks' actions. Now Bordiga
was not up to asking such a question. He always maintained the Leninist
presuppositions and followed them through to their conclusions. One can
say that, somehow, the Russian revolution ended as a political
phenomenon with him, a phenomenon having to master the economic forces
in the direction of developing to socialism.

It
is useful to know Bordiga's other works so as really to understand his
position on Russia. We shall summarise them briefly. Bordiga was
fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-innovating, i.e. he fought those
who thought that it was necessary and possible to create a new theory
or that one must publish marxism, defined as:

"One uses the expression 'marxism' not to mean a doctrine discovered
and introduced by the individual Karl Marx, but to refer to the
doctrine arising with the modern industrial proletariat and
'accompanying' it during the whole course of a social revolution -- and
we conserve the name 'marxism' despite all the speculation and
exploitation of it by a series of counter-revolutionary
movements." [32]

What is essential is the reference to a class defining itself by the
mode of production it aims to create. The method by which it has to
realise this creation is its programme. The fundamental lines of the
programme for the proletarian class were established from 1848. They
are: the proletariat must constitute itself as a class, thus as a
party. Then it must make itself the state to destroy all classes, thus
itself, and allow the development of communism (cf. The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism,
1957). The party is thus seen on the one hand as part of the class, as
the prefiguration of communist society, "the projection into the
present of the social man of tomorrow" (cf., The Theory of the Primary Function of the Party,
1959), on the other as an organ of resistance at the moment when the
proletarian class has been beaten and finds itself under the influence
of the ruling ideology, and so the party has to maintain the 'class
line'. Marxism, seen not only as the theory of the revolution, but as
the theory of the counter-revolution, can resist, and this consists in
maintaining the entire programme of the class. Thus the formal party to
which Bordiga belonged could see itself as the intermediary between the
preceding phase, when the proletariat was constituted as a class, and
the coming phase, when the revolution would rise anonymously, setting
the whole class in motion. Bordiga admitted that the formal party could
disappear, that is, that it could come about that there would no longer
be any revolutionaries defending the class programme after a certain
time, but the party must be reborn after a "distant but enlightening
future" by following the dynamic present in capitalist society and the
fact of the absolute necessity of communism for the species.

What
therefore is basic in the phase of recession (i.e. of strong
counter-revolution which forces the class to retreat to earlier
positions), is the description of communism, the very behaviour of Marx
and Engels, which Bordiga said they took all their lives to describe.
So one can maintain the line of the future in the despicable present,
so resisting the counter-revolution by the rejection of all democratic
formulae and all stray impulses to innovate. This implies a structural
anti-activism because one can only intervene in 'periods ripe with
history' of humanity. Then one must throw oneself headlong into the
battle and not to give in at the first shock, not abandon the party as
soon as the enemy has gained a certain advantage. This was the meaning
of the reflections on the debate of 1926. One should have resisted, the
world proletariat organised by the Communist International should have
faced capitalism while awaiting the opening of the fresh revolutionary
cycle. But once this was abandoned, one had to some extent to pass
through purgatory and then await the counter-revolution to complete its
tasks. Bordiga thought that this was realised in 1956. Hence the
proclamation of a new revolutionary cycle culminating in 1975.

One
had to restore marxism, negated by the Stalinists, one more time during
the period of waiting, without ever losing sight of the immediate
movements of the class, in order to see how far they shake the
implacable dictatorship of capital. But this has to be done without
illusions. Thus he stated that there would not be a revolution after
the Second World War (the fascist nations had lost the war, but fascism
had won), that the Third World War was not imminent, the cold war only
being a form of peace. Therefore there could not be a revolution after
a short maturation as those who believed in an imminent third conflict
inevitably giving rise to a revolution afterwards held. The Berlin
movement (1953) was not the start of a new revolutionary cycle. Nor too
was the 1956 Hungarian uprising, because both were the work of
multi-class movements while the proletariat could only win by
organising autonomously, in struggling for its own ends.

Nevertheless,
it is evident that all this belongs to the past and many ask what
importance does it have? What importance in not flattering Yugoslavia
as a new socialist country? Of not having repeated the same operation
for Cuba, China, or having not stated that the centre of the revolution
was, nonetheless, in the countries of the so-called third world? In
fact, what use is it when all the world is now convinced of the
opposite?

It
is because, in fact, he had a foresight of a certain future of society
that Bordiga was able to have a well determined behaviour allowing him
to escape the revolutionary masquerade of the post-war period led by
Trotskyist and similar groups. His coherence lay there, a theory is not
useful if it does not afford a foresight. Now one cannot foresee
without any certainty.

Bordiga
disagreed with the Bolsheviks several times over the question of
democracy. He was an abstentionist, rejecting all participation in
parliament, all democratic mechanisms. One had to define tactics
rigorously in relation to the conditions of clearly defined struggles
in the historical phases when the proletariat intervened, Similarly he
rejected the theory of state capitalism and considered the theory of
imperialism to be completely insufficient etc. Despite that, we have
already repeated, he never broke with Lenin because he was, for
Bordiga, the theoretician of the dictatorship of the proletariat
(coherent with Marx) and that he was capable of applying it in a huge
country. On the other hand, the whole development of the anti-colonial
revolutions reinforced the correctness of the Leninist position for
him. Hence the birth of the uncritical apologia for the Bolsheviks and,
so doing, he defended the Italian left and himself against accusations
of anarchism, ultraleftism, passivity etc., which led him to
maintaining false judgements on the KAPD, Pannekoek etc., especially
where it concerned questions where they were definitely very close to
him.

But
this is only a particular aspect of Bordiga's work. What is essential,
what characterises him, makes him entrancing, living, is what was
indicated in Bordiga: la passion du communisme;
his certainty of the revolution, communism, displayed prophetically.
Humanity advanced by revolutionary leaps up to communism, according to
him. This evolution was the work of millions feeling their way and,
sometimes, leaping enlightened by huge revolutionary explosions. He
compared all human history [33] to a huge river bounded by two dykes, on the right that of social
conservatism on which marched a chanting band of priests and police as
the cantors of the official lies of the class, on the left that of
reformism on which paraded the men devoted to the people, the
businessmen of opportunism, the progressives. The two bands insult each
other from opposite banks, while fully agreed that the river should
remain in its channel. But the immense flood of human history also has
its irresistible and menacing swellings and sometimes, rounding a
meander, it floods over the dykes, drowning the miserable bands in the
impulsive and irresistible inundation of the revolution which
overthrows all old forms and gives society a new face.

1. "Why have we called the theory of the great men the theory of the battilocchio? The battilocchio is a person who draws attention and simultaneously shows his complete vacuity." (il Battilocchio 1953) (Translator's note)

2. We have discussed this question elsewhere and we have tried to define the historical importance of Bordiga (cf. La gauche communiste d'Italie et le PCI, Invariance Serie I, n. 9, and the introduction to Bordiga: la passion du communisme (Spartacus, Paris, 1974). A number of Bordiga's texts have been translated into French in Programme Communiste, Le Fil du Temps and Invariance.
The translations in the first two are often inexact, not purely on the
level of translation, which is often a matter of appreciation, but
because the translators often thought that they had to remove what did
not suit them and to add what they wanted to Bordiga's texts. To avoid
many notes, the reader is advised that the themes discussed in this
study, often simply alluded to, have been treated more or less
exhaustively in Invariance.

7. The Platform of the Left was adopted at a national conference of the extreme left in Berlin (2.4.1926.) and was published in the pamphlet Der Weg der Komintern (Berlin, 1926). Partial English translation in Helmut Gruber Soviet Russia masters the Comintern (New York, 1974).

17. Old member of the Italian
left, still living. He was a communist deputy before the Second World
War. During that war he actively defended the thesis of the
transformation of the imperialist war into a class war and was one of
the main founders of the Internationalist Communist Party in 1943
(Bordiga did not participate in it, he was not in agreement over the
opportunity of creating such a party). His various disagreements with
Bordiga, especially over the Russian question and the perspectives of
the development of the workers' movement after the war, were one of the
reasons for the split of 1952. One part of the party was to become the
International Communist Party (with Bordiga), the other kept the old
name (with Damen) and continues to publish the paper Battaglia comunista and the review Prometeo. Damen has written a small book Amadeo Bordiga Validita e limiti d'una esperienza (epi, Milan, 1971).

24. Cf. Capital Vol. I p. 302. The final citation is from Goethe's Faust
and is correctly translated as "as if its body were by love possessed"
(as in Fowkes' edition). We have changed the citation only to maintain
coherence with Bordiga's title and the citation translation of the
Italian edition of Capital.